New Royalty Free Music Podcast Episode on iTunes

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It’s that time of the month! A new episode of the Productiontrax.com New Royalty Free Music Podcast is online at iTunes. This episode features the newest (and we think some of the best) royalty free stock music posted to Productiontrax as of May 14, 2012. As always, the music in the podcast is available for further preview and instant download for use in any multimedia project, and most tracks are now available for download in WAV or FLAC format.

Subscribe to the Podcast on iTunes

Here’s a run down of the music in this month’s episode:

We started off with the hard hitting Lunch Time by Vladimir Khokhlenkov, which worked great for an opening underscore, thanks to it’s high energy level, but unobtrusive vibe. We kept things rolling with a surfer rock track called The Wave Chasers, by Gary Wolk, followed by a pretty cool hip-hop background music track that would work in just about any kind of project, What’s Up? by Tony Lopez.

On the softer side, we explored the Jewish sounds of The Wailing Wall by David Hollandsworth, an emotional waltz featuring haunting piano and strings. My Guitar Is So Happy, by Benjamin Lindholm, is a quintiscential folk-pop guitar track that would make a great soundtrack for any television advertisement. It’s hip, fun, and accoustic — a great mix, and super usable. Fivestep, by Running Dog Music, is an ambient, yoga-like track, that features smooth, lush pads and very light percussion. Makes us want to meditate, or start stretching.

We start to pick up the energy at the end of the podcast, moving into Dawning and Sundown by Ruslan Minin, which features a medium tempo smooth jazz feel with an interesting use of asian pipes for the melody. Content and Happy by Tim Brown is a fun, upbeat, pop-rock bed that just screams corporate, presentation, and pop-culture advertising. But before you get to excited, spice things up with a little latin romance with Latin Lovely main by Alec Makinson — it’s a smooth latin jazz track that will make your heart melt.

Our last two picks for this podcast were Private Pool (Full Length Loop) by Score Weaver, a nice hip-hop infused nu-soul production track along the lines of SouLive, and Rules of Attraction by Tim Brown, which provided the perfect outro bed.

How will you use these royalty free stock music tracks in your next project?

Stock Footage: We Got That B-Roll!

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This video was introduced to me at SXSW this year. It’s not a viral ad by a stock media company (which would have been uber-clever), but rather a sketch by a sketch-comedy troupe. I thought it was hilarious — pretty much sums up the stock footage marketplace.

I should note however, that most of the footage, just because it is stock footage, isn’t just cheap B-Roll. Productiontrax (and several other sites as well) has a large library of incredibly usefull, high-quality, thoughtful, and well produced footage. The video clips range from high-tech animations that would fit into any sci-fi film to useful charts and graphs, to yes, B-roll footage of sad guy leaning against a wall.

I think stock media serves a useful purpose in media production. All joking aside, stock footage increases our productivity and frees us up to be even more creative, if you can follow that — the footage by itself is overused and mundane, but it keeps getting used in new, and innovative ways. Don’t let the B-roll label throw you, or keep you from being innovative in how you use stock footage — just remember it’s a tool in your editor’s bag of tricks to help you get your job done, and tell the story in new and interesting ways.

Oh, here’s the video (the owners didn’t want it embedded) — http://youtu.be/SItFvB0Upb8

Stock Music for Befuddled Bee

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Using a combination of ToonBoom Studio 6, Audacity, iMovie,and GarageBand, Yootoon Studios created a fun animated short about a bee who has a moment of uncertainty as he steps out of his hive. To add to the fun and to create a matching soundtrack to highlight the story and give life to their animated character, the folks at Yootoon Studios utilized a stock music track from Productiontrax.com and incorporated it into the one-minute film’s soundtrack.

Baxter Bee – Befuddled Bee uses a piece called The Cue, with music composed, arranged & produced by Thomas Bukket, licensed for commercial use – track ID 5143. It’s a jolly, light-hearted, dixieland piece that is perfect for children’s projects and animated shorts like this one.

Yootoon Studios is cartoon creator Butch Hartman’s new animation channel, with new episodes on YouTube every Wednesday at 12PM. You can even submit your own stuff.

Sound Effects and Cue Sheets

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Because of the lack of education in the film production community about cue sheets, we get a constant flow of questions about cue sheet filings. This post’s question is about sound effects.

Question: We purchased some audio sound effects from Productiontrax.com recently, and are filing cue sheets. Do we need to include every sound file we used on the cue sheet? How do we do this?

You can breathe a sigh of relief, because this one has an easy answer: no. Sound effects are not entered on cue sheets (unless it’s a bona fide musical composition).

There’s a technical copyright-law-legalese explanation for why that is, but basically, one can’t stake a claim to the underlying intellectual property of a fart or a honk or a quack or a bark or a… you get the idea. While the actual sound recording is copyrighted, and yes, you need to license it, there is no public performance right associated to it, and therefore, there is no need to track it.

As briefly mentioned, however, the one exception is when a sound effect contains a musical composition. For example, a sound effect of someone playing or singing Happy Birthday would need to be reported on a cue sheet. Why? Because the song Happy Birthday is under copyright (yes it is) and has public performance rights and royalties attached to it.

Hopefully, this should come as a relief to all of you out there who like to throw a million sound effects into a single production project — like we did in our YouTube video. Leave the sound effects off your cue sheets (in fact, our automated cue sheet tool will not even let them be entered) — and sit back and enjoy the fruits of you labor for once.